Tag Archives: announcement

On behalf of the Postgres Open organizing committee, I’m pleased to share this announcement:

Postgres Open 2011, a conference for data innovators focused on disruption of the database industry through PostgreSQL, will take place September 14-16, 2011 at Chicago’s Westin Michigan Avenue hotel.

“PostgreSQL’s consistent addition of new features and enhancements, while remaining focused on reliability and performance, has provided myYearbook a solid foundation to create new and innovative applications,” said Gavin Roy, CTO at myYearbook. “We are looking forward to the Postgres Open Conference as a venue to share, network, and learn innovative ways to leverage Postgres in our environment.”

Postgres Open, a community-organized, non-profit conference, addresses the breadth of PostgreSQL usage, from core database system design to enterprise database use. Inviting entrepreneurs and technologists on the leading edge of data management, the conference will focus on open source database innovation and changes in the database market. Postgres Open includes regular talks, keynotes and hands-on tutorials.

We’re pleased to announce that VMWare and EnterpriseDB are joining the conference as founding sponsors.

The theme of the inaugural conference is “disruption of the database industry”. Topics will include new features in the latest version of PostgreSQL, use cases, product offerings and important announcements. Invited talks and presentations will cover many of the innovations in version 9.1, such as nearest-neighbor indexing, serializable snapshot isolation, and transaction-controlled synchronous replication. Vendors will also be announcing and demonstrating new products and services to enhance and extend PostgreSQL.

Postgres Open 2011′s main program (September 15-16) will be preceded by a day of intensive, half-day tutorials.

The Call For Papers for Postgres Open will open in late May.

Our program committee includes:
Robert Haas, Major Contributor, PostgreSQL committer,
Josh Berkus, Core Team member,
Greg Smith, Major Contributor to PostgreSQL and author of High
Performance PostgreSQL 9.0,
Gavin Roy, CTO of MyYearbook.com and
Selena Deckelmann, Major Contributor to PostgreSQL.

Create a completely volunteer-run, community conference to connect developers working with open source.

Let me explain with a little background:

My first tech conference was LISA in San Diego in 1997. I ran into Linus Torvalds in the hallway with my friend Steve, and we were both star-struck. I was still a student at the time, and loved every minute I spent rubbing elbows with people that were the pop-stars of the UNIXy world.

I love conferences. And I love Portland. Maybe you can guess what’s coming next.

During an intense brainstorming session at Side Project To Startup, a group of concerned Portlanders drew together a plan for a new conference. We packed a tiny room, and had a heated discussion about what we wanted, what Portland needed, and how we might do it. By the end of the session, Audrey Eschright and I agreed to co-chair. And with the support of Portland’s incredible tech community, we knew we could make it happen.

Open Source Bridge will bring together the diverse tech communities of the greater Portland area and showcase our unique and thriving open source environment.
Open Source Bridge will have curated, discussion-focused conference sessions, mini-conferences for critical topics and will include unconference sessions.

We will show how well Portland does open source and share our best practices for development, community and connectedness with the rest of the world.

Lots of ideas are buzzing around in our heads, and we’d love to talk about them with you! If you’d like to contribute to the effort, stop by the town hall event October 30, 2008 at Cubespace. We’ll have another meeting November 6th, and it will be announced on Calagator.

At the town hall, you’ll have a chance to meet the members of the core organizing committee, and pick up a responsibility or two. We’ll be breaking off into teams for each of the major areas requiring organization, and distributing the work across many people. We will create a mailing list after this first meeting for those who just want to hear about what we’re up to, or participate in some other way.

If you haven’t heard, the Linux Plumbers Conference is happening September 17-19, 2008 in Portland, OR. It’s a gathering designed to attract Linux developers – kernel hackers, tool developers and problem solvers.

A few of us that met through the Portland PostgreSQL User Group (PDXPUG) pitched an idea for a talk on filesystem performance. We wanted to examine performance conventional wisdom and put it to the test on some sweet new hardware, recently donated for performance testing Postgres. We’re asking questions like: Is RAID5 really the worst performing configuration for a database? How much does partition alignment really matter? Is there one Linux filesystem that a DBA should always choose for best performance under any load? Is adaptive readahead all that?

Our talk was accepted, so we’ve been furiously gathering data, and drawing interesting conclusions, ever since. Gabrielle Roth and I are presenting, using the results of extensive testing conducted by Mark Wong, a database benchmarking expert and author of pg_top. We’ll be sharing 6 different assumptions about filesystem performance, tested on five different filesystems, under five types of loads generated by fio, a benchmarking tool designed by kernel hacker Jens Axboe to test I/O.